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That’s where our BUILD2 experience began. Well, nearly began. In all honesty, Evan and Brandon work together, and I joined about 3 hours after the event began, but you get the picture. Four Alteryx enthusiasts came together in Nashville on June 11 to build an app for One Tree Planted, the chosen non-profit for anyone on the Alteryx for Good track.

One Tree Planted plants trees around the world. One dollar plants one tree. Why trees? In a nutshell, they are essential for our Earth’s health.

Sustainability and carbon footprint are hot topics in today’s world, both personal and corporate. And one way in which we can offset our carbon footprint and work towards a sustainable lifestyle is to plant trees. So what if there were an easy way for us to figure out how many trees we need to plant to offset our lifestyle? One Tree Planted requested a Carbon Calculator for personal, corporate, and event planning purposes to calculate how many trees should be planted to offset lifestyles and events.

Enter Alteryx and teams of intrepid volunteers. We were determined to build the most complete app possible for use by individuals, households, companies, and event planners. Team Greenprint was underway!

Before jumping into building, we spent a good deal of time planning. We looked at existing calculators, like the one here, noting what we liked and what we thought could be improved. We mapped out all of the key inputs for our data, and organized into three major categories: Household/Individual, Office, and Major event (events for corporations requiring travel). We grabbed data and calculations from various websites, including eia.gov, carbonfund.org, carbonglobe.com.

Once we had mapped out everything and gathered the data, calculations, and constants, we set to work in Alteryx. Brandon (@brandons) and Evan took on the Household and Office pieces, and Esther (@EstherB47) and Molly (@mwachtel001) took on the Major events. We all worked both independently and collectively to solve our pieces of the puzzle, sharing workflow chunks as we went along, and then integrating into a final product. Esther and Molly then put on their Designer hats to come up with the interface and report, and Brandon and Evan put their advanced knowledge of apps to use to integrate the design and reporting aspects into our final app.

The Greenprint Carbon Calculator interface.

The app's output.

We were down to the wire!! Our final project finished submitting in the final seconds of the build. Within a few hours, we found out that our submission was chosen as a finalist. Molly, Evan and Brandon gathered to create a beautiful presentation and won over the audience at the live demo on Thursday (Esther was already on the Analytics as an Equalizer panel at the same time). Team Greenprint won the Alteryx for Good track!

Beyond the amazing feeling of a win, we are all very proud to have produced a carbon footprint calculator that is easy to use and very thorough. When given the opportunity to jump into a hackathon, jump in with abandon! You never know the amazing results you’ll produce.

@EstherB47 Thanks so much for your team's participation in the BUILD event. I just had the opportunity to check out the app and it is awesome! I know One Tree Planted will think the same and I can't wait to hear their reaction to it and see the impact it has on providing more information to people and building more of a community of volunteers for OTP. Thanks again and we look forward to seeing you all defend your BUILD winners title in New Orleans.